


The Unlikeliest DA Member

by leoperidot



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Carrows Reign at Hogwarts, Dumbledore's Army, Gen, Hogwarts Seventh Year, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 04:31:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19055290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot
Summary: Anthony Goldstein is good with children and terrible at chess.





	The Unlikeliest DA Member

**Author's Note:**

> Minor TW for mentions of self-harm and suicide. No character actually commits either, but the POV character worries about it in the abstract.

“Detentions tonight,” Anthony says. “Who’s got one?” 

“Seamus,” half the voices in the room chorus back.

“Got it.” He makes a note of it. “Any more Gryffindors?” 

“Jimmy Peakes,” says Ginny.

Anthony writes him down. “Is he a third-year?”

“Fourth,” she replies. 

This is Anthony’s job every day: first to decide, based on who has detention, whether a dungeon mission is worth it that night, and then to assign who will be on it. 

They’re half complicated calculus and half completely arbitrary, these decisions. Whenever there are younger students in detention, first through third years, there will always be a rescue mission, and Anthony will try to assign the prefects of the younger student’s house to do it. For older students who aren’t in the DA, they will sometimes try, but it always depends on the larger strategy. For DA members themselves, it’s hit-or-miss—again, strategy. Sometimes it’s worth it to leave one of your own behind. 

Anthony hates when he has to make a decision based on strategy.

“Ravenclaws?”

“Calixta,” Miriam Samuel says.

“Merlin, again?” Michael groans.

Calixta Pinheiro, fifth-year Ravenclaw, had quite a few detentions to her name even when Hogwarts wasn’t run by Death Eaters. Anthony would know, since he’d given several of them. 

It’s strange. Calixta, who was never afraid to give Umbridge a piece of her mind, and carried that on to the Carrows, hasn’t joined the DA. Miriam herself, Calixta’s best friend and the archetypal goody-two-shoes, has. In fact, Miriam is invaluable to the DA, precisely because no one would expect her to join. She’s a fantastic double agent.

“That’s all for Ravenclaws?” Miriam nods. “Good. Hufflepuffs?”

“None that I’ve heard,” Hannah says, and glances at Andrew Lau to corroborate, who nods.

“Great. And just for kicks, Slytherins?”

There are no Slytherins in the DA, nor has there ever been an answer to this question. Slytherins have had detentions—everyone has had detentions—but it’s not the same as the other three houses. Not nearly as often, not nearly as bad, and not for the same sorts of things. They’ve never rescued a Slytherin—there’s never been one who needed it. 

“Erm, actually …” says Natalie MacDonald, fourth-year Gryffindor, looking quite timid.

Murmurs of surprise. Anthony turns to her.

“My brother told me about one. He said a Slytherin girl got detention in his Muggle Studies class.”

Silence.

“And you think it’ll be a real detention?” Neville asks, not unkindly, just skeptical. Slytherins don’t get dungeon detentions. Slytherins don’t get the Cruciatus Curse.

“I … My brother wouldn’t tell me what happened, but he seemed … I don’t know. Surprised, I guess, that a Slytherin would do what she did.”

So, for the first time, in the House column, Anthony carefully writes _SLYTHERIN_.

“We don’t need to save everyone,” Michael says, very slowly. “Think about what happens if we save a Slytherin.”

Anthony doesn’t say anything, because if he tries to debate Michael he’ll lose.

“We save a Slytherin, we now have a Slytherin who knows about us. She’ll know exactly who’s in the DA. She’ll know exactly where we meet. What’s stopping her from turning around and relaying all of that to Snape? The Carrows?”

Anthony knew Michael would say that. He’s spent a not-insignificant fraction of his seven years at Hogwarts on the opposite side of a chessboard from Michael. He knows his style: strategic and quite a bit ruthless. Michael has no qualms about sacrificing any of his pieces if it gets him closer to winning.

Michael is always frustrated with Anthony when they play chess. It’s not that he doesn’t understand the proper strategies: he can always see the path to checkmate. But he’ll spend hours vacillating over moves because he’s taken a liking to the rook and can’t bear to put him in harm’s way. “The rook doesn’t matter,” Michael said once. “You’re protecting the king.”

“That’s the problem endemic to absolute monarchy, isn’t it,” Anthony responded with characteristic cynicism, and didn’t sacrifice the rook. The game ended, as nearly all did, with Michael checkmating Anthony, but Anthony having captured far more of Michael’s pieces than vice versa. And after all, what did it matter if a king survived when he had no more country to rule?

“Natalie, how old is the Slytherin girl?”

“She’s a first-year,” Natalie says.

There goes Michael’s argument. No one in the DA would ever argue against rescuing a younger student, especially not a first year, especially not for strategic reasons. Anthony doesn’t gloat about these things, on principle, because how dare he say “I told you so” about the torture of an eleven-year-old for some minor misbehavior—but if he did, now would be the time.

“What’s her name?”

“Merlin, I can’t remember. It started with a J. Jane?—No, that wasn’t it … Jennie.”

“Jennie,” he repeats.

_SLYTHERIN Jennie ? 1st_

Michael turns to him with an inscrutable face. Anthony stares him down, daring him to argue against rescuing a scared, tortured, lonely first-year from a cold dungeon floor.

“You’re too soft,” Michael told him once, after his and Padma’s prefect badges were revoked for refusing to hand out detentions now they’d become torture sentences. “Ron and Hermione are gone, and the Hufflepuffs are too noble. But you and Padma could’ve done it—you and Padma could’ve been our spies. And you had to go and fuck it up.”

“You want me to send Ian Flanagan to be tortured so I can feed you information,” Anthony repeated flatly. Ian Flanagan was a second-year, and he was rambunctious, loud, and rude—in short, he was a twelve-year-old boy. He’d been stupid enough to set off a Dungbomb outside Alecto Carrow’s office: a terrible decision, and Anthony and Padma made sure he was aware of that. But a reasonable punishment for such a thing was not whatever Carrow herself planned to mete out, so they refused to turn him over. For that, they had been stripped of their positions and given several detentions of their own—but better them than a kid. Anthony would put his life on the line, several times over, in an instant to save any Hogwarts first- or second-year from the sort of abuse that would fuck them up for life.

“Not me, the DA.”

“Still.”

Michael hesitated. “You don’t know what’s coming. Imagine it gets worse. Imagine they start, I don’t know, taking kids ten or twenty at a time. Or holding kids hostage. Or some other unimaginable thing. The information you, as a prefect, could’ve fed the DA could’ve saved them, but you couldn’t bear one kid on your conscience. What’s on your conscience now, Tony?”

There was a long pause. And then Anthony finally found the words:

“Mike, if this is chess, we’re the pawns, not the players.”

In the moment, Michael breaks their staredown, turns away.

“But there’s no Slytherin prefects,” Natalie says.

He hasn’t been on a mission himself in a while. And he has a talent for calming the first-years down, or, at least, Padma says he does. And he is _a_ prefect—or, he was, but that’s a technicality they ignore in the DA—just not a Slytherin prefect.

“I’ll do it,” he says.

_SLYTHERIN Jennie ? 1st Anthony_

—————

The clock strikes eleven and Anthony sets off down the secret passage from the Room of Requirement to the dungeons, Disillusioned, wand at the ready, enchanted Galleon in tow.

He assigned himself for Jennie, the fifth-year Gryffindor Luke Ahearne for Jimmy Peakes, Padma for Calixta, and no one for Seamus, who had proven a few detentions back that he didn’t need saving. 

This is how dungeon duty works: when it’s late enough that they’re reasonably certain the Carrows have done with detention, one of them, usually a seventh-year, will go down and check. If the coast is clear, they’ll send a message through the Galleons—Michael figured out how to target messages specifically to certain ones, to make communication more direct. 

The secret passage begins with nine or ten flights of a dizzying spiral staircase. Not for the faint of heart, torturous when carrying someone, and giving Anthony absolutely no distraction from his terrible, encompassing fear of what he’ll find when he reaches the dungeons.

He was assigned to one first-year scarcely two weeks ago. A shy, bashful Hufflepuff girl named Laura who looked younger even than her eleven years. She wore her dark hair in two curly, cloud-like bunches high on the crown of her head. And the most harrowing moment of Anthony’s life, the moment that made his stomach drop, his heart start racing, his head spin just by thinking about it, was seeing her tiny child body broken on the floor of the dungeon. 

He thought she was dead.

She was breathing, only barely. She wasn’t sobbing, not like most of the younger ones and a fair few of the older ones do. Tears streamed freely out of her giant doe eyes that were now hardened, resolute.

He took her hand. It was limp in his. He told her he was here to help her, that she would be okay.

She closed her eyes.

She let him pick her up, and in his arms she was like a doll. He carried her to the Room of Requirement. There was no life in her, no will. 

Anthony cried that night in an empty loo near Ravenclaw Tower. He sobbed like a child. He sobbed the way Laura should have, if they hadn’t broken her.

How many lives will they destroy? How many children will be left to pick up the pieces?

He knows the Carrows will kill a student this year. He knows it to the marrow of his bones. He doubts they’d directly murder one—although nothing can be ruled out, as things once thought impossible had happened several times before during Anthony’s time at Hogwarts—but at least one student will die before the term is up, and the Carrows will, directly or indirectly, have a hand in the death. 

Someone left too long in the dungeons with an awful injury, maybe, or someone used for _Sectumsempra_ -sharpening in Dark Arts when Amycus will let it go just a bit too far. It won’t be one of them, the older cohort of the DA—it’s too much fun to torture them, and each DA detention is another step on the Carrows’ dogged quest for DA intel. It won’t be a pure-blood, either, not even a Gryffindor pure-blood—they’re too valuable. It will be someone disposable, a half-blood who generally keeps their nose clean but for one mistake. It will be someone they can risk, a sacrificial lamb, to see if Snape will ever rein them in. (He won’t.)

Or it will be someone who takes the _Sectumsempra_ lessons to heart and turns their wand on themselves. Or another broken body at the bottom of the Astronomy tower. 

That’s why Anthony watches and worries. He sees who isn’t eating; he sees who’s isolating themselves; he sees who isn’t feeling the same joy they once felt at a favorite pastime. He will do everything in his power to prevent the Carrows from taking a single innocent, promiseful life. They can torture them, they can beat them, they can use them to sharpen their knives and their curses. But they will not break a single student, not if Anthony has any say. 

That night with Laura reminded him that sometimes, maybe most of the time, he doesn’t have a say.

He reaches the bottom of the stairs and takes a deep breath. He needs his wits about him. Dungeon duty isn’t the flashiest DA mission, but what it lacks in flagrant defiance it makes up for in sheer conspicuity. The Carrows might still be in the dungeons. The Slytherins, not all that far away, might hear any attempt at rescue. 

And, of course, Anthony’s worst fear: it might fail.

One day, the Carrows might tighten security. Start trapping the kids with security that can’t be broken by _Alohomora_. One day, they might set a trap in the corridor, magical trip wire, that will alert them to the DA’s presence. One day, he might come down and see the carnage, see the desperation, and not be able to help.

His only solace from this nightmare is that the Carrows aren’t smart enough to divine such a problem, or such a clever solution. But, fifty years ago, people said Hitler was too stupid to do real damage. The numbers tattooed on Anthony’s grandfather’s arm indicate otherwise.

He reaches the corridor with the dungeon cells detentions are held in. It’s pitch black—promising, since the Carrows always extinguish the lights upon leaving. He hears someone wailing—also, perversely, promising, as crying so loudly when the Carrows remain in the dungeons will always be rewarded with more torture. So he risks it: first un-Disillusioning himself, then muttering “ _Lumos_.”

Seamus is in the first cell. “Lovely evening, isn’t it, Goldstein?” he whispers. He pulls himself up by the bars of his cell.

“Just beautiful,” Anthony replies. 

“You know there’s a Slytherin tonight?”

“I do, actually.” He takes the Galleon out of his pocket, begins casting the complicated magic to tell Padma and Luke that the coast is clear.

“I think she’s the one who’s crying. Only a fuckin’ first-year.”

“The Carrows are brutes.”

“Aye.” With a mournful expression, Seamus shakes his head. “So it’s her, Peakes, and your one Ravenclaw girl, what’s her name—Calissa?”

“Calixta.” He nods. “No surprises there, those were all the ones we came up with.”

“Good,” Seamus says. This is punctuated by a particularly heart-wrenching wail from down the corridor. He winces. “Who’re you here for?”

“Her.”

He nods. “Go to her. I’ll keep the passage open. _Alohomora_.” He unlocks his cell door, pushes it open, takes Anthony’s watchful place.

“Thanks, mate.”

“Good man.”

The Slytherin girl—Jennie, Anthony reminds himself—is in the last cell. 

When he reaches her, she startles and huddles closer to the wall. She’s grimy—they always are—and tiny, cradling one wrist in the opposite hand. She almost looks like a little Malfoy, with blond hair glowing blue in his wandlight, but she can’t be, or the whole castle would know. She hides her face in her knees, and Anthony’s heart breaks. She is so young. They’re all so young.

“Hey,” he says, crouching down to be on her level. “It’s okay. I’m not here to hurt you.” 

She fumbles for something—her wand, which she points at him. Which is entirely fair.

“I promise you, I’m here to help. My name’s—”

“I know who you are,” says a voice unsure of its brashness. “You’re Anthony Goldstein. You’re a b-b-bl—”

“Blood traitor?” he finishes. She gives a meek nod, clearly holding back tears. “I don’t deny it.” 

“I can’t trust you,” she says, as though she’s trying to convince herself of it more than him. “You could be trying to kidnap me. Blood traitors are dangerous.”

So far, she doesn’t seem any different from the rest of the indoctrinated. He wonders how on earth she ended up here, when she so perfectly parrots out the blood supremacist talking points. 

“You don’t have to keep up this facade with me,” he ventures.

“It’s the truth,” she insists, but doubtfully.

He switches tactics. Extinguishes his wandlight for a second in favor of lighting the torch on the wall of the dungeon, which glows a much kinder orange. Then holds out his hand through the bars of the cage, not too far in that she’d feel attacked, not too far away that she couldn’t reach it. “I promise I won’t hurt you,” he says. “Even though I am a blood traitor. You don’t have to trust me forever. But do you believe me, just for now?”

He waits patiently, unmovingly. Padma, helping Calixta out of the next cell over, smiles gratefully at him. 

The Slytherin girl gives a timorous, tentative nod.

“Can I come in?”

She nods again, then says, “I’m Jennie.”

“Jennie,” he repeats. “ _Alohomora_.” He opens the cell door, comes in, and sits down in front of her. She sets her wand down and continues cradling her left wrist in her right hand. “Are you hurt?”

She shakes her head stubbornly.

“Are you sure?”

After a long pause, Jennie nods the sheepish nod of a child who doesn’t want to admit an injury. Children, Anthony has learnt, are desperate to be seen as strong and mature, and they take seriously any threat to that perception. 

“Can I see?”

She tentatively holds out her injured wrist. It’s swollen, but doesn’t look crooked, which is a good sign. Anthony takes it as gently as he possibly can, feeling for a break with the lightest touch he can muster. He thinks it could be, at worst, a minor fracture. At best, a sprain. 

“Ouch,” he says. “A sprain, those can be nasty. But I can heal it for you, if you want.” She nods. It’s a perverse sort of fortune that wrist injuries are so common in Carrow detentions, as he’s become deft with the healing spell. “ _Episkey_!”

She winces once, but then relaxes. 

“Does that feel better?” She nods. “Good.”

“How do you do that?” she asks with genuine interest.

“The healing spell? It’s a sort of Transfiguration. Something is wrong in someone’s body, so you think very hard about the way it should be, and Transfigure it back to normal.”

She smiles. “I used to read this anatomy book—” She cuts herself off suddenly, her smile fading.

“What is it?”

She shakes her head.

“You can tell me.”

Jennie hides her face in her knees again. Anthony hears her sobbing softly. He rubs her back. “It’s okay.”

“No it isn’t,” she mumbles.

“I’m sure it is.”

“I’m—I’m a—” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m a b-b-blood traitor.” Her sobs redouble, sounding again like the keening that welcomed Anthony to the dungeons. 

He lets her cry. “It’s okay,” he says. “It really is. I promise you.”

“My dad’s a wizard, but he left when I was five. My mum’s a Muggle. She put me in Muggle school, and she gave me these Muggle books, and I was so happy back then. And I took some of those books, like the anatomy one, to Hogwarts because I thought—” A shuddering sob. “I thought they’d make me happy. But now nobody will talk to me and everyone makes fun of me and they say I’m a blood traitor and I’m no better than a Mudblood and I should’ve been taken to Azkaban like all of them and I don’t even know what Azkaban is!”

A younger Anthony might have taken this as an opportunity to teach her what Azkaban was. Current Anthony understands kindness and tact.

“I just want to go home,” she sobs. “No one wants me here anyway.”

Her sobs subside into hiccups.

Anthony sits there for a second, heart aching, unable to respond, nearly shaking with the protective anger he has come to know so well.

He begins, “You’re not a blood traitor. You’re a half-blood. You have claim to both the magical and Muggle worlds. That’s beautiful.” He channels all his elder-brotherly rage into his next sentence: “Anyone who insults you or makes you feel bad or wrong for being a half-blood is the lowest of the low. Be proud of how you belong to both worlds. That’s something to celebrate, not to malign.” He wipes a tear from her cheek with a thumb. “You are so strong and so brave, and I for one am so glad you’re at Hogwarts.”

She sniffles, then wraps her tiny arms around him and brings him in for a hug. He holds on until she lets go.

“OK, Jennie, what do you say we get out of this dungeon? It’s cold down here.”

She nods, still wiping away tears. 

“You want to walk? Or I can carry you.”

“I can walk,” she says defiantly, pushing herself to a standing position. He’s threatened her position of maturity.

“I’m sorry for assuming,” he says, and means it. “Sometimes people leave detention and they can’t even walk on their own. But I can tell you’re super strong.”

She gives the tiniest laugh. That’s a win.

Anthony extinguishes the torch and lights his wand-tip to guide Jennie towards the secret passage. He stops at the bottom of the nine-story spiral staircase, turns to his little companion, and asks, “Jennie, can you keep a secret?”


End file.
